With the continued proliferation of computing and networking technologies, information security now is a concern for most organizations, regardless of their size. Indeed, several levels of security are oftentimes implemented within an organization's data network to control access to network resources. In such a data network, a user wishing to access a particular network resource (e.g. data, application, hardware, or the like) must first be authenticated before access can be granted. In that regard, such information security tends to be user centric.
Social networks now are commonly used by organizations as cost effective solutions for managing information for such users. Social networks often rely on a collaboration of a variety of disparate data sources, which can be quite complex. To facilitate such collaboration, internal identifiers typically are used to provide links between different data groups. The internal identifiers can be based on user names, employee identifiers, departments, geographic locations, or any other type of identifiers that may be associated with the data groups.
Management of the internal identifiers has shown to be vital to the success of social networks. Oftentimes the internal identifiers are tightly bound to directory infrastructure that was first deployed using the internal identifiers. Thus, any changes to such infrastructure will typically have a significant impact on the accessibility of user information. For instance, if an internal identifier associated with a user changes, and such change is not implemented within each of the data sources containing the user's information, the links between the data sources may be severed.